Reflecting the importance of providing excellent self-service to manage rapid growth and satisfy customers, you might want to launch tier 0. What is tier 0? It’s the self-service tier; the support available to customers that does not require directly interacting with a customer advocate. This includes the knowledge base available in an online help center, the product training that is available to customers, as well as assistance that is available in the product’s user interface.

Our support teams were one of the early adopters of Freshdesk’s new version — the Mint Experience. We caught up with Andy, our regional support manager, to talk about his experience with transitioning from the old Freshdesk UI to the Mint Experience. Here’s what he had to say.

We recently interviewed Kim Goodwin, consultant, speaker, and author of Designing for the Digital Age. Kim shared how to make user-centered values pervasive in your organization.

There are two things many support teams struggle with when it comes to knowledge management: knowing exactly what their customers need help with, and how they can keep their help content fresh. Though it’s tough for them, it’s even tougher for customers. Nearly 81% of customers want to solve their problems on their own before reaching out to an agent, but 40% say that help center searches don’t generate the help they’re looking for.

If you keep up with recent trends in technology, then you’ve probably been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) lately. Artificial intelligence has many uses and is already seeing multiple cases of real-world applications. But that doesn’t tell you much about how your business can use it, or if it’s going to be something you need to adapt in the coming years. For instance, can it help you deliver a great customer experience?

There used to be a panicked feeling that would set in when we’d have any sort of outage or issue in Basecamp past — that stomach-dropping, heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed feeling. But on November 8th when I awoke to a 6am text spelling out Basecamp’s downtime, I wasn’t worried.

Impacting as many as 500 million customers, Marriott’s data breach is one of the largest in history. While we don’t yet know the root cause of the breach (which impacts hotels within the Starwood Group and is believed to predate Marriott’s acquisition of the group); what surprised many people is just how long the door was left open for the attackers – four years in total!

We released Zulip Server 1.9.1 today. This is a bug fix release, containing a few dozen cherry-picked changes since 1.9.0.

It usually requires a special kind of person to succeed in customer service. These individuals are in constant contact with customers, which makes them symbols of how a business performs. Good customer service employees are eager to help; bad ones are eager for the day to be over.

Great design is no longer just about how a product looks and feels, but how a company understands and listens to its customers, how it hires and organizes its teams, and how it anticipates and accounts for change. No one is more aware of this than Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures.